Staff Benda Bilili

February 22, 2009


The band is formed of homeless paraplegics and polio victims from Kinshasa, Congo, and travel in customised wheelchairs

(Belle Kinoise)



Rob Fitzpatrick

All bands need a back story, a carefully constructed series of ever more improbably tumultuous events and circumstances that aim to grab as much of the potential audience as possible. In the history of back stories, however, none has come close to the Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili, and the more you read about them, the more you listen to them and watch them, the more you think none ever will. How could they?
Formed by a group of homeless paraplegics and polio victims living in an area of Kinshasa close to the city’s zoo, Staff Benda Bilili are more of a force of nature than anything as prosaic as a group. In Lingala — the Bantu language spoken in Kinshasa — Benda Bilili means “look beyond appearances”, which may help when first confronted with four songwriters and musicians riding heavily customised, hand-built wheelchairs accompanied by a young, all-acoustic rhythm section, while out front stands 17-year-old Roger Landu playing the satonge, a one-string lute (“like the mythological monster of our traditional tales who has only one eye”) he invented and built himself from the remnants of a tin can, a bit of old basket and a lone electrical wire.
Ricky Likabu, the band leader, singer and guitarist, is a battle-hardened veteran of Kinshasa’s streets, yet his songs are largely graceful laments suitable for the wine-dark corners of an abandoned dancehall. His hero is “James, the American. I don’t know his name. Is it Bram or Broo? The one who sang Sex Machine”. Coco Ngambali is a songwriter and arranger, Theo Nsituvuidi sings soprano and plays guitar, Djunana Tanga-Suele sings, Kabamba Kabose Kasungo raps and dances, Cubain Kabeya plays his makeshift drums and Randi is on percussion, while Cavalier Kiara-Maigi plays the acoustic bass guitar.
If this all sounds a bit hair shirt, a bit worthy, it isn’t, because, most important, Staff Benda Bilili are a really, really good band, the sort of band who, from the moment you hear them, make all the rest of their story, as amazing as it is — this is a band that sued the UN for $100,000 in a royalties row over their song Let’s Go and Vote — simply fall away. Likabu describes their sound as a mix of “rumba, blues and tribal salsa”, but what that amounts to on the Très Très Fort album is a string of incredibly affecting songs that also draw on funk, soul and mambo while they deal with corruption, poverty, disease and the waste of lives they see around them every day. Recorded at night, near the zoo, in the open air, with a dozen microphones, a Mac laptop and electricity stolen from a deserted snack bar, the songs are delivered with a devastating melodic ease; nothing is forced, everything just flows.
Since 2004, they’ve had their daily lives documented by the film-makers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye, whose movie about the band will be released later this year. “We were making a film in Kinshasa at that time and heard about this band of crazy handicapped people playing a blues of their own construction somewhere downtown,” says Barret. “Our first encounter with Staff was one night in a district called La Gombe. They were rehearsing in front of a fancy restaurant where all the white expats go. We were guided to them by the power of their music. It was like, ‘Do you hear that? Where does it come from?’ We found them and started following them and began to realise that they were the strongest people we had ever met. Staff are true survivors.”
“The idea for the band was born when we used to do import-export between Kinshasa and its sister capital, Brazzaville,” says Likabu in an e-mail from Kinshasa. “Coco and I used to sing together on the boat on the way back home, our first name was Staff Raka Raka, we played with (the Congolese rumba star) Papa Wemba.”
In England, the Congo only ever appears in the news as a place skewered by war and poverty, but Staff Benda Bilili have called themselves “the true press”, while Ngambali calls local journalists “slaves to power”. Likabu insists that within the group everyone has his strongly held opinion, but as a group “we never talk about politics except to plead for the unification of all Congolese people. We might talk about the sorry state of medicine and education in our country, but that’s it”. The emphasis is always on music, how it can teach and heal, how it can make people who have nothing feel they have something to live for.
Ngambali, 50, and Likabu, 55, have known each other for 30 years and have worked together all that time, despite the spiralling problems of their homeland. In 2004, they found Roger living at the Kinshasa central market — he was one of the shégués, abandoned street children who number 40,000-100,000 in Kinshasa alone, children who get by selling drugs, polishing shoes, begging and guarding cars. They decided to adopt him, despite being homeless themselves. Soon, he was making music with them. “For us,” says Likabu, “it’s all about their attitude.” Their song Staff asks a single question: “What are you going to do today to find something to eat for your kids?” “That’s the only real issue in Kinshasa,” says Barret. “Staff is a song of dignity and respect and it pays tribute to all the people who live in the streets.”
Likabu says the true heroes in the Congo are “the orphans, the refugees, the street kids and the whores who support their families. They all are ‘Bana Staff’, the children of Staff”.
For Barret and de la Tullaye, five years following the band has taught them an enormous amount. The people they’ve met through SBB have been warm and friendly, with a huge sense of humour, but, he says: “They’re also extremely aware of the fact that nobody gives a shit about them, or the fact that their country is being robbed by foreigners while their own people are starving. The conditions here are extremely harsh and, being white, you represent something to the population: you are a walking dollar bill. One day Ricky told me, ‘You’re with us, but you’ll never be one of us.’ They’re true bad boys, they drink ‘tshweke’, smoke ‘diamba’ and go ‘chop-chop’ with sexy ‘mabata’. But they still sleep on ‘tonkara’, their cardboard beds. It’s pretty easy for us to stay humble.”
This spring, the band will leave the Congo for the first time for a European tour. “We will be glad to meet the public,” Coco says. “We want to learn from them as they will learn from us.”
“It’ll be exciting to get away,” Likabu says. “People know about the bad situation in the Congo, but the music keeps us strong. Whatever we’ve been through, we make jokes. We insult each other for fun. I’ll say, ‘Hey you, with the lazy foot!’ — just private jokes. The difference is we have confidence now. We know we’ll make it.”
Très Très Fort is released on Crammed Discs on March 23 - TIMES ONLINE

Disabled by polio, a group of homeless Congolese buskers called Staff Benda Bilili are attracting Western film-makers, musicians and internet fans with their sweet and funky music

Djunana's smile is pure Ray Charles, blissful and bright. He's busy cutting a rocking rumba rug on the dirty concrete stage of L'Oeil Du Plaisir, a roughneck dance bar in the heart of the Congolese capital Kinshasa. Since he has no legs, or rather, only short floppy polio-ravaged stumps, it seems as if he's buried waist downwards, with only the upper half of his extraordinary frame visible while the rest boogies in the maw of the earth. Every part of his body is beaming, every sinew dances. I stare at him impolitely, and inside a confused voice is asking: "What has he got to feel so happy about?"

I imagine that most of the party of musicians and adventurers who have arrived with me in this beer-crate and sawdust joint on a voyage of musical discovery organised by Africa Express are asking themselves the same question. After all, finding the appropriate rank in the global hierarchy of suffering for a disabled musician who lives rough on the streets of Africa's most deranged and dysfunctional megalopolis seems like a no-brainer. Or is it?

Then Amadou Bagayoko, one half of the Malian duo Amadou and Mariam, gets up on stage to inject some sharp and slithering guitar licks into the rippling song. Damon Albarn adds his melodica to the mix. Sam Duckworth's grin is broader than Broadway. The rappers from De la Soul look entranced. This is no time to get all morose and philosophical, but if the beer weren't so sharp and cold, the music so warm and honeyed and the whores so statuesque and impossibly graceful, the temptation to slip into a bout of soul-searching would be overwhelming.
Sharing the stage with Djunana are four other disabled musicians, an able-bodied bassist and a young B-boy dressed in hip-hop baggies who is playing his satongé like a panhandling Paganini.
I later learn that this lean, gentle-looking kid, who goes by the name of Roger Landu, invented the instrument he's playing with such dazzling virtuosity. The raw materials of the satongé consist of a milk-powder tin, a section of fish basket frame and a single electrical wire. A few days later, at our hotel, Roger makes up santongés to order and sells them to us for $20 (£14) a pop... good business for a shégué, or homeless kid, who was surviving by busking for pennies in the Kinshasa central market.
Roger's resourcefulness makes him a model citizen, a fine practitioner of the infamous Article 15 of the Congolese constitution, which exhorts all true patriots to find a way to cope and survive by fair means or foul. The French have a fine verb for it... "se debrouiller".
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, a country that has been raped and abused by men in power, foreign and native, for more than a century, you either embrace Article 15 or die. Most residents of Kinshasa wake up in the morning with one goal in their heads: to find something to eat and make it through the day with wit, courage and cunning. Tomorrow doesn't even trouble their minds. Today and the next meal are all that count. Self-pity is suicidal.
The band who are weaving spells about our ears with their dulcet rolling rumba and keening vocals are the unrecognised geniuses of Article 15, the masters of survival. They call themselves Staff Benda Bilili, which, in Lingala, the lingua franca of this vast and variegated country, means something like "the people who see beyond..." Beyond prejudice, corruption, the lies of priests and politicians, the grimy veneer of daily life.
Lounging after the show on his extraordinary moped wheelchair contraption, Coco Ngambali, the group's primary songwriter, explains; "We see ourselves as journalists. We're the real journalists because we're not afraid of anyone. We communicate messages to mothers, to those who sleep on the streets on cardboard boxes, to the shégués." Coco's face is like a granite boulder bathed in soft evening light, an astonishing mixture of gentle wisdom and rawhide toughness. As well as being a gifted composer, he's reportedly a champion arm-wrestler.

But let's go back a way. The story starts with a microscopic organism that wheedles its away into the gastrointestinal tract and then the central nervous system. Before the mutilations of recent wars in eastern Congo added to the demographic, the poliomyelitis virus accounted for most serious disabilities in Kinshasa. The victims were often abandoned by their parents, first to various struggling religious institutions and then to the streets. The handicapped are also deemed to have demonic powers, and therefore find themselves ostracised by a fearful able-bodied society. But the hapless legion of Kinshasa's polio victims have developed extraordinary survival strategies.
One of these strategies is to form gangs, which roam the streets in bizarre gizmoidal wheelchairs, extorting protection money from shopkeepers. Another is to take advantage of one of ex-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's more benign statutes exempting the disabled from paying taxes on the ferries which steam across the vast Congo river, linking Kinshasa with Brazzaville, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the opposite shore. Wheelchairs piled high with cigarettes, alcohol, petrol, rice and all types of stock both straight and crooked are heaved by armies of young street kids up the ferry ramps and on to the waiting boats. Various "associations" of disabled traders dominate the commerce of Ngobila Beach, the ferry port on the Kinshasa side. Thirty years ago, it was here that Coco met Ricky Likabu, or "Papa Ricky" as he's known to the shégués of Kinshasa's downtown.
Ricky is the backbone of Staff Benda Bilili, the group's strategist, disciplinarian and motivator, a man of many talents and a benign arbitrator of petit disputes. Most days he hangs out with the rest of the group at the Sonas opposite the UN building, busking, holding court, surveying the toxic frenzy of Kinshasa's street life.
Coco and Ricky used to be members of Raka Raka, one of the many backing combos of the renowned Papa Wemba. But when Wemba was incarcerated in France for visa and immigration fraud, the pair decided to set up on their own. At the time, they were living in a refuge for the disabled. In 2004, a pair of French film-makers, Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye, happened on the group as they were busking. It was the genesis of an intense creative relationship.
Barret and De la Tullaye started filming the group, and recording them at the studios of the Congolese Radio and TV. In 2006, they delegated the recording part of the project to the Belgian producer Vincent Kenis, the man behind Konono No. 1, Kasai All Stars and the Congotronics compilations. The first Staff Benda Bilili CD, entitled Très Très Fort, is out on Crammed Discs in March.
It's clear from a peek at the rushes of Barrett and De la Tullaye's film that Coco, Ricky and their entire extended family place great store on the world release of their CD to provide the finance needed to realise their dreams. Ricky talks of opening a centre for the disabled and homeless people of Kinshasa. He also dreams of touring Africa with Staff Benda Bilili, spreading the message of communal resilience and self-help.
Whether the crisis-riddled music industry in the West is capable of fulfilling these hopes is unclear. Staff Benda Bilili's music has no need of sentimental crutches. It stands proudly on its own formidable limbs, mixing 70s funk, old Cuban son and mambo with the mellifluous flow of classic Congolese rumba, evoking the golden age of Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau. The musicianship is subtle and precise, forged by the group's extraordinary work ethic, and their sound has a raw simplicity and uniqueness, thanks partly to Soklo, Kinshasa's most famous guitar maker, who supplies most of the city's street musicians. Roger's wonderful satongé solos provide icings on this well-apportioned cake.
Filming in the city has required huge amounts of courage and sangfroid, but like most people who have spent time with Staff Benda Bilili, Florent is in awe of their mental strength and toughness.
Watch the video for Na Lingui Yo by Staff Benda Bilili

"They're obstinate and courageous, they're survivors," he says.. "And they're very generous. They've taught the street children an enormous amount. Everybody is in the same misery in Kinshasa but you get the impression that the handicapped cope better than the able-bodied. They often say, "A handicap is in the mind, not in the legs."
The fascinating tale of Staff Benda Bilili is about to enter a new "international" phase. A summer tour of Europe and the UK to coincide with the release of Très Très Fort is in its planning stages, but 400,000 people have already viewed the brief snippets of film about the band on YouTube. It seems that an altogether more congenial and auspicious viral chain reaction than the one that robbed them of their limbs all those years ago has already been unleashed.
On the last day of our brief Africa Express visit to Kinshasa, some of us go down to the zoo to see the group. 3D from Massive Attack foregoes a trip to the crafts market to join us. The sounds of rehearsal drift our way. Ricky and Coco greet us with friendly smiles. We express our hope to see the group in England; a hope which may finally be on the verge of reality. Then after one last song we take our leave of Staff Benda Bilili and their world, where the battle against misery produces traits and values capable of making a pampered, sheltered Westerner feel jealous.
That's where all those endlessly predictable images of poverty and disease that dominate the Western media's coverage of Africa are so aberrant. Africa doesn't need our pity. Africa demands and deserves our admiration and wonder, our humility and respect. Staff Benda Bilili embody this truth with total dedication and style.
'Très Très Fort' is out on Crammed Discs on 23 March. Videos of the band can be seen on YouTube - THE INDEPENDENT

Sunday 18 January 2009

14 Staff Bendi Bilili
A wonderful group of paraplegic street musicians who live around the zoo in Kinshasa, Congo, also championed by Damon Albarn. - THE OBSERVER

An extraordinary release with an equally extrairdinary backstory. From the streets around Kinshasa Zoo, Congo, come four paraplegic singer/guitarists, a young all acoustic rythm section, and a 17 year old prodigy on one-strig electric lute- a group of abandonned street kids or shegues and handicapés, whose songs docment their everyday life. Founder and lead vocalist Ricky Likabu, 55, sleeps in tonkara or cardboard boxes, but dresses smartly and believes that "a man must be suka" (elegant). Young Roger Landu built his satongé or one-string guitar fom electrical wire, attached to a small wooden bow inserted in a dried milk can -it sounds a bit like an ondes Martenot in its uppe register. The group's rumba -rooted grooves have echoes of R&, reggae and funk. The album opens with the mournful, reggae-ish "Moto Moindo", Landu's satongé weaving a weird obliggato round the leader's rich baritone; the song goes through several transmutations while retaining its haunting minor mode. The slow, graceful "Poliomyelite" has an ambient chorus of cicadas, while the plangent "Sala Keba" is a lilting call and response, with sentimental solos from satongé. Très Très Fort was recorded outside, mainly in the zoo area, a cable illegally connected to a nearby bar and the results are memorable.
Andy Hamilton - The WIRE

For the past year, I've been emailing friends with links to Staff Benda Bilili clips on YouTube. Most members of the band are disabled - paraplegic victims of the polio virus - and homeless, living around the area near the Kinshasa zoo. The YouTube clips present them in a bewitching light. Their wheelchairs are huge contraptions that look as if they are made of cast-off section of Harley Davidsons, and the group are heard harmonizing old-time Congolese rumbas to a backdrop of handclapping and guitars. But the moment that gets everyone is during the song 'Je t'aime', when a street kid called Roger launches into a blistering solo on his homemade one-string lute, and a teenage-girl sits alonside him and dissolves into a smile. Really, there is nothing so heartening.

We are all going to buy this wonderful record, we are going to share it with our friends, and - hey presto - we will have the Buena Vista Social Club of the brave new Obama age. For Très Très Fort is a gem - dreamy, joyful and full of delicious melodies. Its music is nostalgic for the classic years of Franco and OK Jazz with its Cuban-inspired call-and-response harmonies and lilting Africa rhythm guitar, yet it's been reinvented with gorgeously fresh songwriting. Check out the insistently catchy guitar licks of 'Je T'aime', or the vocal harmonies of 'Sala Keba' or 'Mwana', and you will find the melodies ringing in your head for days. The production by Vincent Kenis (who also brought us Konono N°1) is a triumph: many of the songs were recorded out in the open, in the zoo grounds, seducing us with the sounds of Kinshasa offstage.

So there you have it: Album of the Year - signed, sealed and delivered. — Mark Ellingham - Songlines

All bands need a back story, a carefully constructed series of ever more improbably tumultuous events and circumstances that aim to grab as much of the potential audience as possible. In the history of back stories, however, none has come close to the Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili, and the more you read about them, the more you listen to them and watch them, the more you think none ever will. How could they?

Formed by a group of homeless paraplegics and polio victims living in an area of Kinshasa close to the city’s zoo, Staff Benda Bilili are more of a force of nature than anything as prosaic as a group. In Lingala — the Bantu language spoken in Kinshasa — Benda Bilili means “look beyond appearances”, which may help when first confronted with four songwriters and musicians riding heavily customised, hand-built wheelchairs accompanied by a young, all-acoustic rhythm section, while out front stands 17-year-old Roger Landu playing the satonge, a one-string lute (“like the mythological monster of our traditional tales who has only one eye”) he invented and built himself from the remnants of a tin can, a bit of old basket and a lone electrical wire.

Ricky Likabu, the band leader, singer and guitarist, is a battle-hardened veteran of Kinshasa’s streets, yet his songs are largely graceful laments suitable for the wine-dark corners of an abandoned dancehall. His hero is “James, the American. I don’t know his name. Is it Bram or Broo? The one who sang Sex Machine”. Coco Ngambali is a songwriter and arranger, Theo Nsituvuidi sings soprano and plays guitar, Djunana Tanga-Suele sings, Kabamba Kabose Kasungo raps and dances, Cubain Kabeya plays his makeshift drums and Randi is on percussion, while Cavalier Kiara-Maigi plays the acoustic bass guitar.

If this all sounds a bit hair shirt, a bit worthy, it isn’t, because, most important, Staff Benda Bilili are a really, really good band, the sort of band who, from the moment you hear them, make all the rest of their story, as amazing as it is — this is a band that sued the UN for $100,000 in a royalties row over their song Let’s Go and Vote — simply fall away. Likabu describes their sound as a mix of “rumba, blues and tribal salsa”, but what that amounts to on the Très Très Fort album is a string of incredibly affecting songs that also draw on funk, soul and mambo while they deal with corruption, poverty, disease and the waste of lives they see around them every day. Recorded at night, near the zoo, in the open air, with a dozen microphones, a Mac laptop and electricity stolen from a deserted snack bar, the songs are delivered with a devastating melodic ease; nothing is forced, everything just flows.

Since 2004, they’ve had their daily lives documented by the film-makers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye, whose movie about the band will be released later this year. “We were making a film in Kinshasa at that time and heard about this band of crazy handicapped people playing a blues of their own construction somewhere downtown,” says Barret. “Our first encounter with Staff was one night in a district called La Gombe. They were rehearsing in front of a fancy restaurant where all the white expats go. We were guided to them by the power of their music. It was like, ‘Do you hear that? Where does it come from?’ We found them and started following them and began to realise that they were the strongest people we had ever met. Staff are true survivors.”

“The idea for the band was born when we used to do import-export between Kinshasa and its sister capital, Brazzaville,” says Likabu in an e-mail from Kinshasa. “Coco and I used to sing together on the boat on the way back home, our first name was Staff Raka Raka, we played with (the Congolese rumba star) Papa Wemba.”

In England, the Congo only ever appears in the news as a place skewered by war and poverty, but Staff Benda Bilili have called themselves “the true press”, while Ngambali calls local journalists “slaves to power”. Likabu insists that within the group everyone has his strongly held opinion, but as a group “we never talk about politics except to plead for the unification of all Congolese people. We might talk about the sorry state of medicine and education in our country, but that’s it”. The emphasis is always on music, how it can teach and heal, how it can make people who have nothing feel they have something to live for.

Ngambali, 50, and Likabu, 55, have known each other for 30 years and have worked together all that time, despite the spiralling problems of their homeland. In 2004, they found Roger living at the Kinshasa central market — he was one of the shégués, abandoned street children who number 40,000-100,000 in Kinshasa alone, children who get by selling drugs, polishing shoes, begging and guarding cars. They decided to adopt him, despite being homeless themselves. Soon, he was making music with them. “For us,” says Likabu, “it’s all about their attitude.” Their song Staff asks a single question: “What are you going to do today to find something to eat for your kids?” “That’s the only real issue in Kinshasa,” says Barret. “Staff is a song of dignity and respect and it pays tribute to all the people who live in the streets.”

Likabu says the true heroes in the Congo are “the orphans, the refugees, the street kids and the whores who support their families. They all are ‘Bana Staff’, the children of Staff”.

For Barret and de la Tullaye, five years following the band has taught them an enormous amount. The people they’ve met through SBB have been warm and friendly, with a huge sense of humour, but, he says: “They’re also extremely aware of the fact that nobody gives a shit about them, or the fact that their country is being robbed by foreigners while their own people are starving. The conditions here are extremely harsh and, being white, you represent something to the population: you are a walking dollar bill. One day Ricky told me, ‘You’re with us, but you’ll never be one of us.’ They’re true bad boys, they drink ‘tshweke’, smoke ‘diamba’ and go ‘chop-chop’ with sexy ‘mabata’. But they still sleep on ‘tonkara’, their cardboard beds. It’s pretty easy for us to stay humble.”

This spring, the band will leave the Congo for the first time for a European tour. “We will be glad to meet the public,” Coco says. “We want to learn from them as they will learn from us.”

“It’ll be exciting to get away,” Likabu says. “People know about the bad situation in the Congo, but the music keeps us strong. Whatever we’ve been through, we make jokes. We insult each other for fun. I’ll say, ‘Hey you, with the lazy foot!’ — just private jokes. The difference is we have confidence now. We know we’ll make it.” — Rob Fitzpatrick - Sunday Times

'Staff Benda Bilili are a group of paraplegic street musicians who live in the grounds of the zoo in Kinshasa, Congo’. Even amid the tales of gun-toting guerrilla factions or rapping child soldiers that often surround African music, the publicity behind this particular band grabs the attention.

More compelling still than their unusual back story is their debut album Très Très Fort, which mingles the classic Congolese sounds of rumba and soukous, the original 20th-century African dance music, with bursts of funk and melancholic reggae. Rousing choruses and call-and-response singing are underpinned by punchy rhythms, while the high-pitched inflections of a homemade single-string guitar, fashioned from a milk can and electrical wire, appear intermittently for hypnotic solos.

A contemporary African classic, recorded on the fly and outdoors in the Kinshasa Zoo, the album will appeal to fans of the blues or the Buena Vista Social Club, as much as followers of Fela Kuti or the cult Congolese act Konono No 1, the group which Staff Benda Bilili’s Belgian label, Crammed, released to much acclaim in 2005.

Congolese music incubated the spirit of Cuban rumba in the Forties and Fifties, to create an Africanised version of a genre which was itself indebted to the music of enslaved Africans who had been brought to the Caribbean. In the decades that followed, funk and reggae took root in Africa through international stars like James Brown and Bob Marley. This interplay between Africa, the Caribbean and the United States is what makes Très Très Fort such a special record.

Via email from Kinshasa, Ricky, the leader of the group, explains that the group’s enticing mix of styles came naturally to them. “We had always been listening to our Congolese fathers like Franco & OK Jazz, but when the American black music arrived here in the mid Sixties it was like a revelation.

“James Brown is a true inspiration and when he played in Kinshasa in 1974 all the musicians went crazy.” Like their musical heroes, Staff Benda Bilili – benda bilili means 'look beyond appearances’ –have the loose, easy confidence born of extensive practice. They have long relied on music to earn a living.

“Music has always been a job to us, it is not a hobby,” says Ricky. “We play outside the fancy restaurants, people give us money, we split it, we eat. We have many other jobs, but music is our favourite.”

The life-affirming qualities of the group’s music, heard on uplifting tunes like the driving Avramandole, are all the more surprising given their circumstances. At the group’s core are four singer/guitarists who have been handicapped since childhood by polio, a condition they talk about on the album in one doleful ballad. To free them from using crutches they all ride eye-catching customised tricycles. The one-string guitar which is key to their sound is played by Roger Landu, a 17-year-old shégé or street kid, who met the group when he was 12.

This unlikely alliance, between the older “handicapés” and the much younger shégé reflects the extraordinary solidarity that seems to exist among Kinshasa’s dispossessed. As well as offering memorable tunes, the album is a fascinating portrait of their lives on the margins of a city which is itself hardly acknowledged by the rest of the world.

“We don’t have a real home,” explains Ricky. “Like hundreds of thousands of people here, we live in the street, where we rehearse, do business, eat and sleep. We live among the street kids, the crooks, the whores, the bad cops, the refugees from the war in the east. So we have a good vision of what the Congo is today.” The album’s title (which in English means “very very strong”) is a kind of manifesto: “We have to find ways to survive, no matter how. Like all the people who live in the streets of Kinshasa, disabled or not, we have to be strong.”

Kinshasa-based French filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye have been following Staff Benda Bilili since a chance encounter in the street five years ago, and have been instrumental in securing the group a record deal and promoting them on YouTube, where striking videos of the group’s members dancing furiously, using only their impressively muscular arms, first appeared last summer.

While their music contains echoes of the past, the story of Très Très Fort is resolutely contemporary: from a chaotic urban locale in the developing world, they have, with a little help, harnessed cheaply available technology and digital media to create a record with global appeal.

“Staff Benda Bilili are true survivors, nothing is impossible to them,” says Barret. “This is a message to the world. That’s why we started the movie.

“Being handicapped is not an issue – in Kinshasa everybody leads the same harsh life and the handicapped are well organised compared to the healthy.”

Like the resolute core of the band, who abandoned their crutches and adapted technology to give themselves independence, their record stands for itself. According to Barret the group’s disabilities are not the key to understanding them, however fascinating this aspect of their story may be.

“The daily burden of being handicapped in a manic and brutal city like Kinshasa has certainly framed their 'blues’,” he says. “But Staff Benda Bilili don’t define themselves as handicapped. They define themselves first as musicians.” — Gervase De Wilde - Telegraph

The music of Staff Benda Bilili will certainly captivate listeners in 2009 all by itself, but it’s unlikely that this band – nay, community – will achieve their deserved prominence without considerable focus on, and discussion of, their extraordinary circumstances. Formed by a group of hardened handicapped men in a section of Kinshasa that borders the city’s zoo (one can only imagine the ugly visual and psychic poetry of a zoological park in the middle of a wounded city near the center of one of Africa’s most troubled regions), Staff Benda Bilili (I’m told that “Staff” means “staff,” but “benda bilili” means “beyond appearances”) comes across as a society or way of life more than a combo.

Led by the steely-eyed Ricky, a veteran of Kinshasa’s streets with a reputation as a tough guy and a bit of a hustler, the group plays a lilting, gentile dance music that would seem to draw on Congolese rumba, Cuban son, and a healthy dose of regional and ethnic musics, including songs sung in the regional Yanzi dialect. It’s a stark contrast to the overdriven pulse of their “countrymen” (in fact, they still call where they live Zaire, but let’s face it: Europeans made up these countries) like Kasai All-Stars and Konono No. 1. While the former have introduced African trance music to the rest of the world, Staff Benda Bilili, despite their rough and tumble circumstances, are more like ambassadors dispatched from an era of the dancehall.

As the March release of the group’s album Très Très Fort (“Very Very Strong”) approaches, a film about the group has begun to make the rounds at film festivals. From the appearances of the trailer, Buena Vista Social Club it is not. There seems to be significantly more attention to the conditions in which these men – and the street children that have joined their ranks as carriers of the Benda Bilili torch – live and less focus on the kind of post-colonial slumming that, in Wim Wender’s exotic travelogue, featured Ry Cooder’s son towing along his doumbek to jam with septaugenarian Afro Cubans. It’s decidedly unlikely that African music dilettantes will take to the streets of Kinshasa to run with the paraplegic musicians of Staff Benda Bilili and their army of young war orphans (one of whom plays a handmade, one-stringed lute-like instrument with the precision of a Guitar Institute of Technology grad), but one can be assured that their uniquely Africa fusion music will find a larger audience.

While Ricky and his compatriots show a clear bond with the regional sounds that inform their repertoire, there is a surprisingly strong backbone to what they do, due in no small part to their circumstances (handicapped in a poor nation with little resources and many of those resources likely dedicated to the continent’s bloodiest insurgency) but also, perhaps, from the influence of funk and soul. Some of the ostinato guitar patterns and percussion rhythms bear a resemblance to the languid grooves of juju and Fuji found several nations to the north, and the refrain of the trailer’s soundtrack almost certainly quotes James Brown’s “Sex Machine.”

Monsieur Ricky and the band display a largely existential perception of themselves, proud of their achievements in the face of their own social and physical plight, but undeniably worldly and sophisticated.

“We must prove that people with a handicap can get the whole world on the dancefloor and, so, are hardly ‘disabled persons’.... Staff Benda Bilili is très très fort,” insists Ricky. When asked whether music has the power to heal, he replies “music does heal people, especially those who are torn apart by love, poverty, or madness, because music encourages socialization, not exclusion.”

The world will soon hear the music of Staff Benda Bilili, a band of men of all ages who are not disabled, but are simply musicians with handicaps. Staff Benda Bilili is very very strong — Andy Freivogel - Dusted